David Wroblewski Quotations

I grew up in the middle of dairy country in Wisconsin, about as far from any major metropolitan area as you can get. I always assumed I was going to be an actor. I don't know why. I didn't have any reason to think that. In fact, when I finally did try it, when I was in college, I was really bad at it and didn't enjoy it.

My childhood was spent with dogs, and I work with dogs surrounding me. This relationship is hardly unique - man-and-dog stories date back to ancient history, up to 10,000 years ago - but it feels that way to me. I used to have a love-hate relationship with dog stories because some got the dynamic right but most were dead wrong.

When you're making something big, whether it's long-form fiction or a big piece of software, whatever that is, you're having a very intimate and extended conversation with the work materials themselves.

I think it’s just as likely that someone could say that this place, right here, is heaven, hell and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.

It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost—not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions. All of which is to say: stories, too, are wild things.

That mirror, that's one I hate to let go, he said. That was my daughter's the whole time she was growing up. It probably seen her more than me--everything from a baby up to twenty years old. Sometimes I wonder if all that might still be inside it. Got to make an impression on a thing, reflecting the same person every day.

She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time. When she'd been young, she'd had an insatiable hunger for more of it, though she hadn't understood why. Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world. The apple tree was still nice to lie near. They peony, for its scent, also fine. When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within.

When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within. Almondine from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Just when normal life felt almost possible - when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation. (161)

No one can say if you are that person who, given good paint, good brushes, and a fine canvas, can produce something better than the factory man. That is, and has always been, beyond the realm of science. You do have the attitude of the dreamer about you. For that reason, I haven't the heart to argue anymore about this - it is a hopeless talk. And for a simple factory man like me, an effort must be abandoned once its hopelessness is exposed. Only the artist perseveres in such circumstances. (193)

...in that dilated moment after sunset when the sky holds all the light...

You couldn't change a river into a sea, but you could trace a new channel for it to follow.

Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents- the rest you let float by.

That was how it was, sometimes. You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn't matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything. When Almondine had been playful, she had been playful in the face of that knowledge, as defiant as before the rabid thing. Sometimes you looked the thing in the eye and it turned away. Sometimes it didn't.

Nothing is going to happen to me, or you, for that matter. Anything can happen, though. Anything can happen. But most always, just normal things happen, and people have happy lives.

I set writing aside when I went into theater, and then I set theater aside and subsequently had about a 25-year career in software development. Which, by the way, is a very creative field. I equate it more to kinetic sculpture than anything else, as an activity.